This is a great initiative, however one way to sure ruin a good service, with good intention is to spam people unnecessarily with test messages in the middle of the night.

Anybody know how to disable emergency notifications on an iphone? Don't want to be woken up again so early.

The whole point of it is you shouldn't be able to disable it. It everyone did that, what'd be the point, if there was an actual emergency? And then imagine the angst. "ZOMG The Government killed my dad cos he wasn't notifiied, <nash><nash><angst><rage>"

This is a great initiative, however one way to sure ruin a good service, with good intention is to spam people unnecessarily with test messages in the middle of the night.

Anybody know how to disable emergency notifications on an iphone? Don't want to be woken up again so early.

The whole point of it is you shouldn't be able to disable it. It everyone did that, what'd be the point, if there was an actual emergency? And then imagine the angst. "ZOMG The Government killed my dad cos he wasn't notifiied, <nash><nash><angst><rage>"

Yea, gathered that now. Question then, will this service notify by location (cell tower), or will everybody in NZ be getting civil emergency messages for occurrences even far away?

I experienced a version of this in New York last year (genuine weather alert for flooding, not a test) and I was impressed by the idea (as I mentioned on a thread here IIRC) and I am delighted we have finally caught up by implementing this.

I hope, like the US system, it will work on roaming phones as well as local ones - I assume it will just be any phone on the network at the time.

Yea, gathered that now. Question then, will this service notify by location (cell tower), or will everybody in NZ be getting civil emergency messages for occurrences even far away?

Geographic alerts are the core basis of the system so it can alert by cell tower.

It will be interesting to know how this will work (or whether it will work) with femtocell customers.

Thats good news then, I guess its going to take a considerable amount of co-operation between mobile operators, and civil defense. ie the passing on of sensitive information, like mobile numbers + current location. Do we trust civil defense with this sort of information? I'm skeptical, If they testing this service overseas, does that mean this sensitive information is in the hands of whoever has been contracted to implement the system.